MENTAL FUNCTION 411 



of the attention of the individual. This variety or phase of volition is 

 inherited from our ancestors and constitutes primarily the chief part of 

 the mental (sensori-motor) inheritance of the infant. 



The second sort of action thought of as will is the habitual voluntary 

 movement. If we take the closure of the eyelid at the sudden approach 

 of an object as a typical reflex volition, a good illustration of an habitual 

 voluntary movement would be the act of walking as it is performed 

 by the adult. This process is a reflex movement with conspicuous 

 conscious voluntary aspects. Underlying it is the same mass of nervous 

 influences present in reflex movement. In this case, however, these 

 nervous influences are in larger part sensory. By this means they 

 keep the conscious individual so fully aware of where he is going and 

 what he is walking on that the process may be accurately directed and 

 controlled. In addition, then, to the mass of nervous influences and 

 sensory impulses (the motor idea) in habitual voluntary movement, 

 there are elements of deliberate attention more or less conscious. Num- 

 berless examples of these habitual voluntary movements will readily 

 occur to the reader, for most of the every-day routine actions involving 

 cross-striated muscle are in this class. They are all essentially voluntary 

 movements which have become sufficiently reflex to require less conscious 

 attention than formerly. (See Expt. 88 in the Appendix.) 



The third sort of will given us in terms of actions are new voluntary 

 movements. Were the student of medicine to undertake to artistically 

 engrave an intricate monogram on a silver vase, he would have in his 

 experience a striking illustration of a new voluntary movement. If we 

 analyze this experience physiologically, we shall find in it the same mass 

 of nervous influences and sensory impulses that were present in the 

 habitual voluntary movement. In the present case, however, the ner- 

 vous influences are almost all accompanied by clear kinesthetic sensa- 

 tions. Besides this, there is required a large degree of deliberate atten- 

 tion to the movements and strains of the arms and trunk, and in addition 

 to this a continually exerted choice that the movements shall continue in 

 just the right way. In psychological terms we have here the motor idea 

 coming into the brain from these exclusively voluntary muscles plus 

 forced and carefully directed attention plus deliberate choice to continue. 

 All of these, it will be observed, are highly conscious processes. It is 

 only in this third sort of volition that the aspects of will as commonly 

 known to the average man become conspicuous. In such movements 

 as these, made by the motor nerve-centers and the cross-striated muscle 

 often under great stress of effort and continued only by great fatigue and 

 even pain, every man would recognize the exertion of his will. The 

 other two aspects of will which we have just described are volitions from 

 a somewhat more biological point of view. 



The fourth and last sort of will which we need to briefly describe is 

 that which may be best perhaps called choice, or free-choice decision. 

 It is almost wholly about this aspect of willing that our philosophical 

 ancestors talked and wrote so much in the century before the last. In 



